The New Vintage Tin

In the dark ages of this thing called hot rodding, you could go out in the desert, the farm fields, or along the river banks and find all sorts of old cars, bodies, and parts just lying there, free for the taking. Maybe you’d have to slip the land owner $10 or $20 to keep his dogs at bay. That’s exactly how Norm Grabowski and Tommy Ivo built their seminal, historic hot rod T roadsters: They drove up into the desert, found the T body with the fewest bullet holes, and hauled it home for free. Today we might call it recycling.

But that was nearly 60 years ago, and the bodies were 20-some years old at the time. Think about that. A decade or two later, when roadsters and coupes were reborn as “street rods,” Tom Medley or Tex Smith coined the term Vintage Tin to describe this increasing-in-value stuff and instituted a monthly column in Rod & Custom magazine from 1968 to 1974 to show amazing and forlorn old cars that the readers could find. The editors stated, “We’re ostensibly looking for worn-out or badly frayed potential street rod material to prove to non-believers that out behind that barn, over yon hill, or under a hay pile, there’s much more to meet the eye than ’glass replica Ts.” The only requirement was that the cars and parts be pre-’49. They claimed it was the most popular column in the magazine.

That was 40 years ago. That vintage tin is gone. What wasn’t gathered up and turned into actual hot rods was either squirreled away by collectors (or hoarders) to become today’s pricey “barn finds” or else literally recycled into new Hondas or Toyotas. Barn finds are today’s hot topic, but those cars in desirable body styles are quite rare and usually expensive. Then there are the lost hot rods—the surprisingly plentiful rods, customs, or race cars from the ’40s to ’60s that may or may not have been famous and that still sit in suburban garages nationwide (and is the subject of your author’s new book, Lost Hot Rods; see Amazon.com). This story is not about any of those.

This is about the cars you can see and buy. There are tons of ’em—quite literally. These new Vintage Tin are cars are from the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s—ones now 40 to 50-plus years old, if you can believe it—that are sitting along rural highways, in plain sight in people’s yards, in vacant lots, behind repair shops, in a few remote "classic car" sales yards, or in other odd places. Take a look at the photos. The cars range from drivers to derelicts, from cool coupes to less desirable (but perhaps now more acceptable) four-doors. These cars are (mostly) not abandoned. They’re sitting where they are because someone has already collected or saved them. That means they’re “collectible” models—at least in someone’s opinion—and that their owners believe they are worth something. Some are for sale, some not, at least in theory. Just like the original Vintage Tin, these cars are all potential hot rod or custom car material. The New Vintage Tin is not as cheap as the old Vintage Tin. But then nothing is, is it?

So where are the cars in the photos? I’m not going to tell you, exactly, but I’ll offer some clues. There are a million-plus readers of this magazine, and I don’t want to create chaos at some old car lot in the middle of nowhere (plus it would escalate prices immediately). I will tell you that my wife and I spent two weeks late last summer driving 4,025 miles, mostly on non-Interstate highways. Our primary stops were in Denver, Colorado, and Longview and Austin, Texas. Nothing seen here is from those cities. But our route took us through Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Arizona, and back to California. You will note that these are all in the Southwest, where you will find an abundance of rust-free New Vintage Tin, not so much because the climate is so dry but because these areas don’t have snow, slush, and salted roads all winter. Two years earlier, we traveled similar highways north through Eastern Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and saw just as much raw material in similar condition.

The cars shown here are just examples of what’s available. Sure you can find similar stuff on your computer, but you can’t see it and you can’t haggle on the price face-to-face, and sitting in your computer room is not nearly as much fun as getting out on the highway and searching for vintage tin treasure sitting around the next corner or over the next hill. This stuff is out there. It’s available. Go find it.